I thought it was OK – the ridiculous elements of the main premise I can suspend belief on, and the tech stuff I don’t know enough about to care if it’s wrong. It could go either way at this point – if it improves in the next few episodes, then it could be a nice little show. If it gets worse, well then, off teh DVR it’ll come.
As for the hotness factor… I can’t speak for the women, but I think Chuck is pretty cute. Too young to really register on my ‘hotdar,’ but pretty cute. Adam Baldwin falls more into my hotness parameters.
Maybe it’s just the haircut, but Chuck reminded me of Jim Halpert from The Office. And I thought it was kind of sad that a Stanford engineering grad was working as a manager (or was he just a peon?) at the Nerd Herd.
Regarding the TRS-80 - it’s made pretty clear that it actually is a retro-programming thing, so that didn’t bother me at all. Chuck likes Zork - heck, so do I. He made his own zork-like game for the Trash 80 - well, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the z-machine (the zork-like game interpreter) had been ported to it, so it’s certainly plausible.
Am I the only one who actually likes the lead actor? Yah, he’s uncharismatic - but he’s supposed to be. And at the end of the ep, when he says that he’s going home, I think he did a good job of showing just how mind-blown and tired he must be at that point.
It’s not a brilliant show, the writing isn’t shakespearean, and none of the actors will get emmys. But I quite like this thing, and I hope it doesn’t get cancelled.
Huh? Where do you get few actual deaths? You did see where the hair pins got dipped in red stuff, which was obviously poison - one of which then was administered to the thoracic cavity, the other to a thigh? Deaders.
The guy with a short knife up through the abdomen? Might or might not make it. and that’s with modern anti-biotics: peritonitis still kills. If not dead, out of action for months.
I think that at least one or two more of the dance hall victims were deaders, too, but I can’t be sure.
There’s no reflection on the deaths of the various spear carriers, but there’s death there. For that matter, how did Adam Baldwin’s character go from being one of three people in the SUV to just being one person come the Mexican Stand Off? The guy in the backseat on the SUV, no seatbelt - deader, or severely FUBARed.
While there may have been deaths, they were implied deaths, not arterial spray decapitation beyond the shadow of a doubt deaths. Like I said above, my daughter thought they were hilarious slapstick clowns. (We weren’t sure how action-y it’d be, so we took the chance, and since she found it funny instead of worrisome, we kept it running.)
I know family action shows aren’t so popular anymore, but that’s how it’s done - we don’t need lots of fake blood and CGI sinew and bone. We vaguify it so that the kids can be reassured that as soon as the camera faced the other way, the bad guy got up and limped to the doctor who made him all better.
I did, I admit, say, “Oh! I hope they were wearing their seatbelts!” when the SUV hit the barrier. As Baldwin got out, we all cheered because his seatbelt made him safe. “Nice spin, Mom,” my 14 year old remarked wryly.
But yeah, it was still a little too manically violent for a two and a half year old, so she won’t watch it with us again.
I don’t disagree that any serious consideration of mortality was quite absent. I just was reacting to the idea that you were comparing it to shows that went out of the way to prove that no human characters, even spear carriers, were killed. The worst examples of this I can recall being the old G.I. Joe cartoons, or as you mentioned, The A-Team. Neither one of which would have had any of the details I’d mentioned.
Of course I was enjoying the show for the Mary Sue factors, rather than anything else. Expecing realism in any kind of Mary Sue story seems futile.
(Dammit give me my nerd fantasies with meat on them.)
I didn’t recall seeing a knife to the thoracic cavity. Were we shown the name of the stuff she put on the hairpins? Because I didn’t think the hairpins were poisoned, at that point she had not been given the order to kill Chuck if he tried to get away so I figured it was something to help subdue him if necessary. I saw the guys writhing on the floor but they didn’t look dead.
I guess what I meant to say is that for people who are supposedly not afraid to kill when necessary they seemed to go out of their way not to actually, outright, quickly kill someone and when/if they did it was not very messy. The bullet to the head in the beginnning was the most definite death and they did not show the impact like many other shows would do.
Sorry, I’m going to assume any Ominous Red Sticky Stuff[sup]TM[/sup] put onto a stabbing weapon is a lethal toxin until proven otherwise. And for all the concern towards Chuck, Sarah was still being warned about how Casey was in the area, and very dangerous. I saw the arsenal in that manner, not so much directed towards Chuck.
Yeah, she did put something on the ends of the hair sticks - at first I thought it was a montage shot of some makeup thing, but then it became clear.
Of course, those of a male and/or lesbian persuasion may have been distracted by the shot of her putting her leg up on the bed to equip her daggers. (Personally, I was thinking, “Wow, there was some serious waxing involved here.”)
I’m topping this because I don’t think there’s enough interest for a new thread every week. I just wanted to mention that they did a shout out to Lost. They showed Chuck some pictures and he started spouting off secrets one of which was “they shot down Oceanic flight 815”. I thought it was funny that they’d reference a popular show on a rival network.
I came in here to say the same thing. I think this is a case of know your audience. Computer geeks who always wanted to be a secret agent – and of course those guys are Lost fans.
This show requires huge leaps of fate to enjoy and it’s nothing special. I suspect that every subsequent episode will deal with a problem that involves national secrets and Chuck will haphazardly save the day.
The episode last night was pretty much a bore other than the CIA chick in her German-esque work uniform. I’ll probably give it one more shot next week. The show really doesn’t need to be an hour, I was surprised it wasn’t 30 min this week.
“Nice spin, Mom,” my 14 year old remarked wryly.